Harry Bernard Coonce (born 1939) is an American mathematician notable for being the originator of the now-popular
Mathematics Genealogy Project
The Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) is a web-based database for the academic genealogy of mathematicians.. By 31 December 2021, it contained information on 274,575 mathematical scientists who contributed to research-level mathematics. For a ty ...
, launched in 1996, a web-based catalog of mathematics doctoral advisors and students.
[.]
Coonce conceived of the idea while reading the unsigned thesis of his
academic advisor Malcolm Robertson, in the
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...
library, and wondering who his advisor's advisor was. The amount of time it took Coonce, without the existence of a central database of such information, to find out that Robertson's advisor was
C. Einar Hille, gave him the idea for the project. In a 2000 interview, Coonce estimated that the project would top out at about 80,000 entries. In June 2016, the number of entries surpassed 200,000.
Education
Coonce completed his PhD in 1969 at the University of Delaware with a dissertation on ''A Variational Method for Functions of Bounded Boundary Rotation''. Coonce presently is a retired mathematics professor of Minnesota State University, Mankato.
Private life
He married Susan Schilling, a computer scientist who died in 2016.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Coonce, Harry
20th-century American mathematicians
21st-century American mathematicians
Living people
1939 births
University of Delaware alumni
Minnesota State University, Mankato alumni